Suddenly I realize that I was wrong. It wasn’t that they’d been fighting. They’d been planning it without me, they just didn’t know how to tell me.
“Look, I know you don’t want to—” Farah starts.
“Want?” I say, incredulously. “This isn’t about want.” Anger whiplashes inside me, surprising me as much as it does Farah. “I never stayed at home because I wanted to.”
“OK, I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“There’s something outside, I can feel it,” I say, desperately. “I know you can too.”
“You made it right the way across town to get here, didn’t you? Nothing bad happened.”
“It was horrible,” I say. “And it was about half an hour. You want to go and spend a week out there.”
“It’ll be better this time. Together.”
I shake my head. “Whatever we feel out there doesn’t want us outside. I don’t think we should antagonize it.”
“Or maybe it makes us scared to keep us in one place.”
Keep moving.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “You’re twisting it.”
“I get it, OK,” Farah says. “You had plenty of good reasons to be scared of going outside in the ordinary world and in this world we all feel exactly the same way.”
“Then why are we even considering this?”
“Chiu didn’t get a chance to tell you the rest of his theory,” Farah says. “He’s been reading about neuroscience for a long time—”
“Of course he has,” I say, bitterly.
“He has a theory. He thinks our consciousness is like a guitar string, a vibration that finds different resonances. He thinks that being here might mean we’re locked in this brain state, this resonance. And that being here might stop us from being able to recover in the ordinary world.”
“You’re listening to a thirteen-year-old’s theories about neuroscience now?”
“He’s not a regular thirteen-year-old, you know that.”
“It doesn’t mean he knows more than the doctors.”
“He might.”
“How?”
“He knows about this place. They don’t.”
I let my head fall back against the wall and heave a heavy, disbelieving sigh. “Whatever is going on here, there’s still a Chiu in the ordinary world and the doctors say he’s going to be fine. There’s no reason to think they’re wrong.”
“There is. Think about it,” Farah says. “Have you ever heard about this place? Read about it? Seen TV programmes about it?”
I shift uneasily. “I guess not.”
“But we know we’re not the only people who have ended up here. So, it stands to reason. Nobody who ends up here makes it back to the ordinary world to tell their story.”
Farah and Chiu are gone when I wake up the next morning.
Panic squeezes inside me.
They left?
I stare at the cream walls and tan carpet of the sad little library and imagine myself here alone. I imagine them discussing it while I was asleep, concluding that I’d never go with them so they should make it easier on all of us and just leave. My heart thuds and the walls feel as if they’re closing around me. I can’t go back to being that person, living my life locked up and all alone.
I think about what Farah said. We know we’re not the only people to come here. So maybe Chiu’s right: if anyone ever got back to the ordinary world we’d know about this place. There’s an awful, undeniable logic to it that Chiu understood right from the start.
When we met him, he thought he was a ghost. He believed us when we told him that he wasn’t, but he never believed that he was going to get better naturally. He’d been reading for years with the aim of understanding the world he found himself in, since he met us he’d been reading for another purpose: to escape.
The note on Farah’s mattress is half lost among the detritus of sheets and books: “Hey sleepyhead. Enjoy your lie-in. Gone to see the baby.”
I shudder with relief, fighting the urge to break down and cry. I’m such a fool. I panicked, that’s all.
I put down the note and go in search of Farah. In the corridor, I can feel the doctors and nurses and patients in the ordinary world nearby, brushing against me, always just out of sight, their breath teasing the back of my neck. It’s a claustrophobic feeling, as if nothing exists beyond my immediate field of vision, as if the world is a gaping, black absence and the walls and details are being drawn in only in the instant before I look at them.
I hurry down the corridors, following the signs to Neonatal. I would be scared of getting lost but I know it’s on the same level as the library and hospitals are, at least, well signposted.
I hear Farah as I round the last corner, singing softly, the baby burbling along with her as if it’s trying to sing too. She stops when she hears me and turns to stare at me.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
